Re: [PATCH RFC 0/2] kvm: Improving undercommit,overcommit scenariosin PLE handler

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Thu Sep 27 2012 - 06:44:47 EST


On 09/27/2012 12:28 PM, Andrew Jones wrote:

>> No, I am not there yet.
>>
>> So In summary, we are suffering with inconsistent benchmark result,
>> while measuring the benefit of our improvement in PLE/pvlock etc..
>
> Are you measuring the combined throughput of all running guests, or
> just looking at the results of the benchmarks in a single test guest?
>
> I've done some benchmarking as well and my stddevs look pretty good for
> kcbench, ebizzy, dbench, and sysbench-memory. I do 5 runs for each
> overcommit level (1.0 - 3.0, stepped by .25 or .5), and 2 runs of that
> full sequence of tests (one with the overcommit levels in scrambled
> order). The relative stddevs for each of the sets of 5 runs look pretty
> good, and the data for the 2 runs match nicely as well.
>
> To try and get consistent results I do the following
> - interleave the memory of all guests across all numa nodes on the
> machine
> - echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space on both host and test
> guest
> - echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches on both host and test guest before
> each run
> - use a ramdisk for the benchmark output files on all running guests
> - no periodically running services installed on the test guest
> - HT is turned off as you do, although I'd like to try running again
> with it turned back on
>
> Although, I still need to run again measuring the combined throughput
> of all running vms (including the ones launched just to generate busy
> vcpus). Maybe my results won't be as consistent then...
>


Another way to test is to execute

perf stat -e 'kvm_exit exit_reason==40' sleep 10

to see how many PAUSEs were intercepted in a given time (except I just
invented the filter syntax). The fewer we get, the more useful work the
system does. This ignores kvm_vcpu_on_spin overhead though, so it's
just a rough measure.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function
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